The ability to remotely monitor patient health characteristics greatly expands the scope of services possible for medical diagnostics and treatment. Traditional patient monitoring often requires bulky and expensive equipment specialized for each sensing parameter, so the sensing and monitoring are often limited to the hospital or clinic. Current miniaturization of this equipment has allowed for the development of mobile sensing devices, and advancements in communication technology have allowed for such devices to be monitored remotely, such as in a patient's home. This combination of the technological advancements is known as remote patient monitoring.
While remote patient monitoring currently exists to some extent, its full capabilities it have yet to be realized. Specifically, most sensing devices are able to monitor only one parameter at a time, and the information is directly sent to the monitoring center. Different sensors do not have an effective system to communicate with each other, and the processing of sensed information cannot be performed in real time with integrated information from all sensors. The result of this incompatibility is a limited set of sensing applications and a sensing system that is not adaptable to changing needs of the patient.
Also, current sensors for remote patient monitoring are still too bulky for very portable applications, and they are costly such that they are not disposable. The sensors that exist in remote patient monitoring systems today are also not autonomous, meaning that the patient must proactively turn on the sensor or apply the sensor every time information is collected.
Furthermore, the process of medical care today is a very slow and inefficient one. With the exception of emergencies, when a patient becomes sick, he or she must first call the doctor's office to schedule an appointment, which may be set for several days from the initial call. Once the appointment time rolls around, the patient must drive to the doctor's office, and is placed in queue to be examined by the nurse and doctor. The total examination time could last only a few minutes, yet the patient may still be required to wait in queue for up to several hours. Without the ability to remotely monitor a patient's condition the inefficient situation described above is difficult to avoid. Remote monitoring systems have been designed primarily for patients with chronic diseases. Therefore, they have very targeted applications and limited applicability to the standard population.